Author
Topic: Logitech harmony ultimate (Read 181877 times)

I decided to try one of these as it looked like it has some interesting new features compared to my trusty harmony 1100. I've not had Chance to have a full play yet but the wifi hub on it has me wondering if this might mean vera can control stuff via IR ?

The wifi hub at its centre lets any IOS or android device send commands via IR and also let's its play direct with Zigbee philips HUE lights. I'm guessing that potentially therefore it would be possible to send commands out via vera in so fashion ?

Anyone seen it or got any experience if that might be possible ? Having a wifi hub to control IR devices ain't new of course but this works rather nicely with the option of using a regular remote and or your phone , tablet. If vera could pile out a few commands along with a "watch movie" scene that would be more than impressive......yes, I do need to get out more.

Well, in general this should be possible. At least there are configurations where the vera sends commands to IR Blasters. Search for "SQ Blaster" or "redeye" in this forum.

Basically this depends on logitech, they would need to provide the information how commands could/should be sent. So you should try to get some developper informations for the device, but that is going to be hrd with logitech I guess.

I will try and see what's around, I'm sure given the nature of it there will be something around at some point. It's a excellent device the wifi to IR unit really is powerful it controls everything in the room even stuff out of lie of sight but its clear to see the unit s packed with IR emitters so it must throw out a lot of light (my old harmony 1100 was also quite powerful). The really is a very good product from logitech ( they have their moments then seem to loose (squeezebox was a lost opportunity) but this sees them again with an excellent product. I need to get out of the habit of pointing the remote at things as it no longer matters....

If and when its possible to have vera throw out some commands to this it would be a killer product especially as the Wifi IR unit is available by itself for those wanting to control it with a phone or tablet.

I don't have a media center PC, so I bought a $35 Raspberry Pi computer and a $20 MCE remote/receiver and modified the instructions above to suit a Linux environment. I then programmed my Harmony remote to send the appropriate MCE keypresses when I push one of the Activity buttons (such as "Watch a Movie") on the remote.

The Pi uses very little power, so I leave it on all the time, and the required software is all free (Raspian, LIRC, irexec and wget). I've been running this setup 24/7 for the past 3 months without so much as a hiccup.

I will investigate that and give it a go. The recent software update Logitech have done is fantastic, you could control hue lights before (which of course report back to vera) but the recent change means you can control the lights based on scene commands from the remote I.e dim the lights when selecting watch movie, so in that respect it kind of cuts out the need to run via vera to do that, especially as vera knows the state of the lights anyway.

I'm going to play with those options more, ideally would be nice to have vera still take charge of the lights one a "play movie" scene was selected from the remote but right as I could add in some nice time delays etc but for now it takes things closer. The harmony ultimate remote and the hub really is a fantastic but if kit especially as it lets anything running the app and the physical controller all sync, so you can turn stuff on with ipad or phone and then make changes or turn if off with the remote. Its one of those things that's just works and I can honesty say I'd not been without it now.

If I could get an infra red input into vera I could add those to the scenes in the harmony and have some very nice trigger of events, yes it would not be two way comms but no different to lightwave etc.

If a anyone wants a really good all in one remote the harmony is certainly worth a look, I think Logitech totally under sell some of its best features.

If they would publish api data for the hub it would be an even better piece of kit.

That looks cool, being able to press "watch movie" on the harmony and have vera trigger a scene to take care of the lights etc would be the final true integration for me. I will have to do some further reading as to how to make the work but a quick read seems to mean its possible.

Oh it's certainly possible. It is the reason I wrote KiraRx in the first place and it has been doing this for me ever since.

I added a custom device to Harmony and learned some codes from a redundant remote for my required lighting scenes: Off, Low, Quarter, Half and Full. Then I learned these codes from Harmony to KiraRx and gave them the same names. I set up four Vera scenes that are triggered from KiraRx recognizing the named codes.

The final step is to edit the Harmony activities to include the appropriate button on the custom light device and you're done.

I don't have a media center PC, so I bought a $35 Raspberry Pi computer and a $20 MCE remote/receiver and modified the instructions above to suit a Linux environment. I then programmed my Harmony remote to send the appropriate MCE keypresses when I push one of the Activity buttons (such as "Watch a Movie") on the remote.

The Pi uses very little power, so I leave it on all the time, and the required software is all free (Raspian, LIRC, irexec and wget). I've been running this setup 24/7 for the past 3 months without so much as a hiccup.

Let me know if I can provide more detail.

So you were able to have the pi act as the mediator between ir and wifi? So if I understand you right, when you press watch a movie on your Harmony it triggers the pi to run a preset scene setup in Vera?

The only way the Vera will be able to communicate with the Harmony is though XMPP/Jabber. While there are some Lua XMPP libraries out there, what makes it really difficult is that each harmony model has a unique UID it uses so there will need to be some community effort to gather all of those.

I'll play around and see if I can't get a little Vera virtual device hooked up on my end. If I can get something that works I'll post it and maybe we can get a group going to gather all those uids.

Well, it took a little longer than I hoped, but I've written small C++ executable that can connect to the Harmony Hub, list all available activities and devices, and start an activity (by ID). It can also get the current activity and list the complete configuration of the Harmony.

I used the pyharmony library as a guide, but (true to python form) dependencies and packaging made that library unwieldy.